The Merlin Conspiracy

We found a kitchen garden there, fringed with those orange flowers that grow in sprays, and a yard behind the house with a well in it. The water had to be pumped from the well by a handle in the kitchen. Olwen, the fat housekeeper, showed us how to do that. It was hard work. Then we went out beyond the yard to a couple of hidden meadows. One meadow had a pair of cows and a calf in it, and the other had a placid, chunky grey horse.

By this time, our feelings of strangeness had worn off. We were used to being in new, unknown places and we began to feel almost at home. We leant on the gate and looked at the placid mare, who raised her chalky-white face to look back at us and then went calmly on with grazing.

I think her lack of interest irritated Grundo. He went into one of his impish moods. “I’m going to try riding her,” he said, grinning at me.

“Your funeral,” I said. To confess the truth, I almost looked forward to seeing Grundo in trouble with my grandfather. I was feeling mean, and depressed about my personality.

Grundo looks soft, but he is surprisingly wiry and this makes him a much better rider than I am. I have never got much beyond the basics. In a soft-hearted way that is annoyingly like Mam’s, I am sorry for the horse for having me sit on its back making it do things. Grundo says this is silly. It’s what horses are bred for. He can make most horses do what he wants.

He nipped over the gate and went calmly across to the mare. She took a quick glance at him and lost interest again. She took no notice at all when Grundo put his hands on her. She was not very tall. Grundo had no difficulty hoisting himself on to her back, where he sat and clicked his tongue at her to make her go. She swung her head round then and looked at him in astonishment. Then… I have no idea what she did then, and Grundo says he doesn’t know either. She sort of walked out from underneath him. I swear that for one moment Grundo was sitting on her back, and for another moment Grundo was sitting up in the air, on nothing, looking absolutely stunned, and the next moment the mare was ten feet away and going back to grazing. Grundo came down on the grass on his back with a thump.

He picked himself up and came hobbling over to the gate, saying seriously, “I don’t think I’ll try again. You can see by all the white on her that she’s very old.”

That made me scream with laughter. Grundo was very offended and explained that the mare was old enough to have learnt lots of tricks, which only made me laugh more. And after a bit, Grundo began to see the funny side of it too. He said it felt very odd, being left sitting on nothing, and he kept wondering how the mare did it. We went scrambling up to the top of the hill behind the manse, laughing about it.

There were mountains all round as far as we could see up there. The peaks we had thought might be a dragon were lost among all the others.

“Do you think they really are part of a dragon?” I asked, while we went sliding and crouching down the other side of the summit. “It was rather mad, the way he said it.” The thought that my grandfather might be mad really worried me. But it would certainly explain why my mother was so terrified of him.

“He’s not mad,” Grundo said decidedly. “Everyone’s heard of the Welsh dragon.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “He doesn’t behave at all the way people usually do.”

“No, but he behaves like I would behave if I hadn’t been brought up at Court,” Grundo said. “I sort of recognised him. He’s like me underneath.”

This made me feel much better. There was a huge, heathery moor beyond the manse hill, and we rushed out into it with the wind clapping our hair about and cloud shadows racing across us. There was the soft smell of water everywhere. And no roads, no buses, no people, and only the occasional large, high bird. We found a place where water bubbled out of the ground in a tiny fountain that spread into a pool covered with lurid green weeds. Neither of us had seen a natural spring before and we were delighted with it. We tried blocking it with our hands, but it just spouted up between our fingers, cold as ice.

“I suppose,” Grundo said, “that the well in Sir James’s Inner Garden must fill from a spring like this. Only I don’t think this one’s magic.”

“Oh, don’t!” I cried out. “I don’t want to remember all that! It’s not as if we can do a thing about it, whatever they’re plotting to do.” I spread my arms into the watery smelling wind. “I feel free for the first time in a hundred years!” I said. “Don’t spoil it.”

Grundo stood with his feet sinking into squashy marsh plants and considered me. “I wish you wouldn’t exaggerate,” he said. “It annoys me. But you do look better. When we’re with the Progress you always remind me of an ice-puddle someone’s stamped in. All icy white edges. I’m afraid of getting cut on you sometimes.”

I was astonished. “What should I be like then?”

Grundo shrugged. “I can’t explain. More like – like a good sort of tree.”

“A tree!” I exclaimed.

“Something that grew naturally, I mean,” Grundo grunted. “A warm thing.” He moved his feet with such appalling sucking noises that I had to laugh.

“You’re the one who’s rooted to the spot!” I said, and we wandered on, making for a topple of rock in the distance. When we got there, we sat on the side that was in the sun and away from the wind. After a long time, I said, “I didn’t mean that about not wanting to remember Sir James’s garden – it’s just I feel so helpless.”

Grundo said, “Me too. I keep wondering if the old Merlin might have been killed so that the new one could take over in time to go to the garden.”

“That’s an awful thing to think!” I said. But now Grundo had said it, I found I was thinking it too. “But the Merlin’s supposed to be incorruptible,” I said. “Grandad found him.”

“He could have been deceived,” Grundo said. “Your Grandfather Hyde’s only human, even if he is a Magid. Why don’t you try telling this grandfather?”

“Grandfather Gwyn?” I said. “What could he do? Besides, he’s Welsh.”

“Well, he made a fair old fuss to the Chamberlain’s Office just to get you here,” Grundo replied. “He knows how to raise a stink. Think about it.”

I did think about it as we wandered on, but not all that much because, after what seemed a very short while, we saw that the sun was going down and looked at our watches and realised it was after five o’clock. We turned back and got lost. The moor was surrounded by green knobs that were the tops of mountains and they all looked the same. When we finally found the right knob and slid down the side of it to the manse, there was only just time to get cleaned up before tea was ready.

“I love this food!” Grundo grunted.

The table was crowded with four different kinds of bread, two cakes, six kinds of jam in matching dishes, cheese, butter and cream. Olwen followed us into the dining room with a vast teapot and, as soon as my grandfather had thundered out his grace, she came back with plates of sausage and fried potatoes. Grundo beamed and prepared to be very greedy. I had to stop before the cakes, but Grundo kept right on packing food in for nearly an hour and drinking cup after cup of tea. While he ate, he talked cheerfully, just as if my grandfather was a normal person.

My grandfather watched Grundo eat with a slightly astonished look, but he did not seem to mind being talked to. He even answered Grundo with a few deep words every so often. I was fairly sure Grundo was being this chatty so that I could join in and tell Grandfather Gwyn what we had overheard in Sir James’s Inner Garden. But I couldn’t. I knew he would give me that look with his eyebrows up and not believe a word. I seemed to curl up inside just thinking of speaking.

I was wondering how often my Mam had sat silent like this at meals, when Grundo helped himself to a third slice of cake, seriously measuring off the exact amount. “I have room for twenty-five degrees more cake,” he explained, “and then I shall go back to soda bread and jam. Does Olwen do your cooking for you because you’re a widower?”

At this, my grandfather turned to me. I could tell he was not pleased. It breathed off him like cold from a frozen pond. “Did Annie tell you I was a widower?” he asked me.

“She said she had never known her mother,” I said.

“I am glad to hear her so truthful,” my grandfather replied. I thought that was all he was going to say, but he seemed to think again and make an extra effort. “There has been,” he said, and paused, and made another effort, “a separation.”

I could feel him hurting, making the effort to say this. I was suddenly furious. “Oh!” I cried out. “I hate all this divorcing and separating! My Grandfather Hyde is separated from his wife and I’ve never even seen her or the aunt who lives with her. And that aunt’s divorced, and so’s the aunt who lives with Grandad, which is awfully hard on my cousin Toby. Half the Court is divorced! The King is separated from the Queen most of the time! Why do people do it?”

Grandfather Gwyn was giving me an attentive look. It was the sort of look you can feel. I felt as if his deep, dark eyes were opening me up, prising apart pieces of my brain. He said thoughtfully, “Often the very nature of people, the matter that brought them together, causes the separation later.”

“Oh, probably,” I said angrily. “But it doesn’t stop them hurting. Ask Grundo. His parents are separated.”

“Divorced,” Grundo growled. “My father left.”

“Now that’s one person I don’t blame!” I said. “Leaving Sybil was probably the most sensible thing he ever did. But he ought to have taken you with him.”

“Well now,” said Grandfather Gwyn. He sounded nearly amused. “The ice of Arianrhod has melted at last, it seems.”

I could feel my face bursting into a red flush, right to the top of my hair and down my neck, because my grandfather had so obviously seen me the same way as Grundo did. So I was a puddle of ice, was I? I was so wrought up by then that I snapped at him, just as if he had been Alicia. “You can talk! If ever I saw a marble iceberg, it’s you!”

Now he looked really amused. His face relaxed and he very nearly smiled.

“It’s not funny!”I snarled at him. “I can see you made my mother terrified of you by behaving like this! Most of the time you’d make her think she wasn’t worth noticing, and then you’d make fun of her!”

Then I gave a gasp and tried to hold my breath – but I couldn’t because I was panting with rage – knowing that a strict person like my grandfather was bound to jump to his feet and order me thunderously out of the room.

In fact, he just said musingly, “Something of that, but Annie brought her own difficulties to the situation, you know.” The mild way he said it surprised me. I was even more surprised when he said, “Come now, Arianrhod. Tell me what is really upsetting you so.”

I almost burst into tears. But I didn’t, because I suspected that Mam would have done and Grandfather Gwyn would have hated it. “If you must know,” I blurted out, “there’s a plot – in England – and most of the Court have been given bespelled water, even the King. The Merlin’s in it!”

“I know,” he said. “This is why I asked for you to come here, before the balance of magic is disturbed even further.”

For a second, I was thoroughly astonished. Then I thought, Oh! He’s a wizard! And that made me feel much better. I could tell by the way Grundo’s face snapped round to look at Grandfather Gwyn, and then went much pinker, that Grundo had had the same thought.

“Tell me in detail,” my grandfather said to us, “every word and sign and act that you remember.”

So we told him. It took a while and Grundo absent-mindedly ate two more pieces of cake while we talked. He probably needed to. It couldn’t have been pleasant for Grundo, having to describe what his mother did. Otherwise, I’d have called him a pig. Grandfather Gwyn leant forward with one forearm stiffly among the tea-things and seemed to drink in everything we said.

“Can you help at all?” Grundo said at last.

To our dismay, my grandfather slowly shook his head. “Unfortunately not,” he said. “I am about to become vulnerable, in a way I very much resent, and will be able to do nothing directly for a while. You have just shown me the way of it. But there is something you can do, Arianrhod, if you think you have the courage. You will have to work out most of it for yourself, I am afraid. It is magic that is not mine to deal in, and it is something your mother never could have brought herself to do. But, if you think you are able, I can put you in the way of it tomorrow.”

I sat in silence in that tall, cold room, staring at his intent white face across the plates and crumbs. Grundo looked to be holding his breath. “I – I suppose I’d better,” I said, when the chills had almost stopped scurrying up and down my back. “Someone has to do something.”

My Grandfather Gwyn could smile, after all. It was an unexpectedly warm, kind smile. It helped. A little. Actually, I was terrified.

I sat down again after Romanov had gone. For some reason, I fitted myself carefully into the exact place I had been in before, with my back against the wall and my heels in the scuff marks. I suppose I wanted Arnold and Co to think I’d been sitting there all the time. But I wasn’t really attending. I was shaking all over and I pretty well wanted to cry.

I was full of hurt and paranoia and plain terror that someone had wanted me killed. I kept thinking, But I told them in the Empire I wasn’t going to be Emperor! They’d taken me there into those worlds and I’d signed things – sort of abdicated – so that my half-brother Rob could be Emperor instead. It didn’t make sense.

I was full of hurt and paranoia too at the way Romanov had despised me. A lot of people had called me selfish. I’d been working on it, I thought. I’d looked after Dad and been really considerate, I thought. But I could tell Romanov saw through all that, to the way I really felt. And of course I still felt selfish, in spite of the way I behaved. All the same, I was trying, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t fair either that Romanov had despised me for being ignorant too! I’d been working on that as well. I’d been reading everything I could lay hands on about magic and trying to get to other worlds – and trying every way I could to persuade the bunch of people who govern the Magids – they call them the Upper Room for some reason – to let me train as a Magid too. It wasn’t my fault they wouldn’t.

Then I thought about Romanov himself. I would never, if I lived to be a thousand, meet anyone else as powerfully magic as Romanov. It was shattering. I’d met quite a few Magids, and they seemed quite humdrum now, compared with the stuff I’d felt coming from Romanov. It was awesome, it was just not fair, for someone to be as strong as that. Razor-edge, lightning-strike strong. It shook me to my bones.

And those big cats shook me to my bones too. When I found they were real…

Hang on, I thought. This is a dream. You always put yourself through seriously nasty experiences in bad dreams. This is just a nightmare.

Then I felt a whole heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn’t really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.

“Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince’s own mages handle security overnight.”

I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.

I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”

“Food!” Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I’m so hungry I could eat that novice.”

“I’d prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them too, “Hotel first, or food?”

“Food!” they both said and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hotspots. Anyone know this town – know where’s good to go?”

I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.

None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.

The driver seemed to understand though. He drove off downhill towards the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.

But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English – or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick too, not French anyway. The place he’d brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows. SCARMBLED EGG, one said, and SNALES was another. LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS and STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA said others.

We all cracked up. It had been a long day and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat not, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”

“Let’s go for the scarmbled egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”

So, in spite of Arnold saying he rather fancied the stake, we went into the SCARMBLED EGG one. We charged in, still laughing, and snatched up menus. I think the proprietors found us a bit alarming. They brought us a huge carafe of wine straightaway, as if they were trying to placate us, and then looked quite frightened when we all discovered we needed to visit the gents and surged up to our feet again.

There was only one of it, out in the back yard past the telephone and the kitchen, where a large fat French lady glowered suspiciously at us as we waited for our turns. I was last, being only the novice, so I had to stand a lot of the glare.

But when we came back to our table, things were almost perfect. We swigged the wine and ordered vast meals, some of it weirdly spelt and the rest in French, so that we had no idea what would be coming, and then we ate and ate, until we got to the cheese and sticky pastry stage, where we all slowed down cheerfully. Dave began saying that he wanted to look at the nightlife very soon.

“In a while,” Arnold said. “I suppose I’d better take your reports first.” He lit one of his horrible Aztec smokes and took out a notebook. “Chick? Any attempts to break through the East? Any threats?”

“Negative,” said Chick. “I’ve never known the otherwheres calmer.”

The others both said the same. Then Arnold looked at me. “How about your patrol? What’s your name, by the way?”

They’ve finally asked! I thought. “Nick.”

Arnold frowned. “Funny. I thought it was something like Maurice.”

“That’s my surname,” I said, quick as a flash. “And I do have something to report. A fellow called Romanov turned up and he…”

That caused a real sensation. “Romanov!” they all shouted. They were awed and scared and thoroughly surprised. Arnold added suspiciously, “Are you sure it was Romanov?”

“That’s who he said he was,” I said. “Who is he? I never met anyone so powerful.”

“Only the magical supremo,” Chick said. “Romanov can do things most magic users in most worlds only dream of doing.”

“He can do some things most of us never even thought of,” said Pierre. “They say he charges the earth for them too.”

“If you can find him,” Arnold said wryly.

“I’ve heard,” said Dave, “that he lives on an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries. Went there to escape his missus.”

“Sensible fellow,” murmured Arnold.

“He escapes there to avoid being pestered to do magic,” Pierre said. “I’d heard he was self-taught. Is that true?”

“Yes – that’s the amazing thing about him,” Dave said. “According to what I heard, he was born in a gutter on quite a remote world – Thule, I think, or maybe Blest – and he pulled himself out of poverty by teaching himself to do magic. Very unorthodox. But he had a gift for it and discovered things no one else knew how to do, so he charged high and got rich quick. He could probably buy our entire Empire now. And nobody’d dare say he couldn’t.”

“Yes, but,” Arnold said doggedly, “was it really Romanov that Nick Maurice met?” He turned and puffed his awful smoke at me, staring through the brown clouds of it with big, earnest blue eyes. “If you were doing as you were told, you’d have been able to see his totem animal. What was it like?”

“I’d heard it was a sabre-tooth tiger,” Chick put in.

“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean, hunting cat, sort of cream with dark grey blodges. It had tufts on its ears and sarcastic green eyes and he said it was female. It came up to my waist, easily. I was scared stiff of it.”

Arnold nodded. “Then it was Romanov.” I could see they were, all four, really impressed. “Did he tell you why he was there?” Arnold asked me. “Was he looking for the Prince?”

“I asked him that,” I said. “And he seemed to think the Prince would make his own trouble, without any magical interference. When he was King, he said.”

They exchanged worried glances at that. Dave muttered, “Could be right. By what I’ve heard, some of Romanov’s island is thirty years in the future.”

“They say he never bothers to lie,” Chick agreed.

I was relieved. I hoped I’d given them enough to think of to stop them thinking any more about me. From the moment Arnold said he thought my name was Maurice, it was like a whole train of pennies dropping in my head. This was not a dream. It was real. I’d no idea how it happened, but I knew that somehow I’d done the thing I’d been longing to do and crossed over into another universe. A real other world. And when I did, I’d turned up beside those fliers while they had all been waiting for the novice to arrive, and they had thought I was him.

This meant that, somewhere back in that other London, there was the real Maurice.

If this Maurice was my age, he wasn’t going to like having gone without breakfast and then finding they’d all left without him. He was going to go back to this academy he came from, or phone there, and tell them. If I was really lucky, them at the academy would just shrug and say serve him right for being late.

But I couldn’t count on it.

What was much more likely, since this cricket match was a Test and going to go on for several days, was that the academy people were going to make arrangements for the real Maurice to get to Marseilles later that same day. Then they were going to phone someone in the Prince’s Security team to say Maurice was on his way. In fact, it was just amazing luck that they hadn’t phoned while I was sitting in that concrete passage thinking it was all a dream. I would have had a rude awakening. Perhaps it took them a long time to arrange the journey. But they could well have phoned by now. Or Maurice could even have got here.